A Best-in-Class iOS App: The Book Series
A five book series over how to make best-in-class iOS apps.
After my indie app Spend Stack was acquired, I wanted to do something that I've always wanted to - distill all that I've learned creating quality iOS apps into one document.
With a few marketing bets, I've now passed $70,000 in revenue in three and a half months. Releasing the book series early has proved to be a great move, as I get to write it at a healthy cadence and folks get gradual content drops too.
Some early, consistent feedback has been that readers prefer this, so they aren't overwhelmed with a 20,000 word book to absorb all at once.
My goal is to get $100,000 in revenue by year's end.
I launched the product in an early access, "beta", form. Folks could get what I have done, get a shout-out in the book, join a private community, enjoy a code sample project and most of all - be guaranteed biweekly updates until the book was finished.
I priced the package at $100, but for beta buyers I provided a 20% discount to bring it down to $80.
It made over $30,000 in the first few days.
With enough validation, I started writing and brainstorming over all of the content I'd want to have in the book. It quickly grew to over....90 chapters.
Early on I realized I needed to cut scope, and find a way to get this into people's hands sooner rather than later to motivate me to see it through.
After taking five years to launch my last product, Spend Stack, I wanted to get something out quickly. But, time is money - and I was only going to work on this if it was validated by at least 500 people.
I put out a tweet with the mailing list and it grew to over 1,500 quickly.